Season 1 – No One Saw a Thing

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Danielle S 12/09/2024 I'm never going to Skidmore. 👍 See more J M @jeffmarshallmovieblogger 02/08/2024 Do you believe in karma? I never have, but this amazing 6-part limited series sure gives me cause to re-evaluate my stance. Stuff like this is what makes me love documentaries, and there is no doubt in my mind that truth is stranger than fiction. Any screenwriter would have been laughed out of Hollywood proposing what happens here as a fictional motion picture. This is one of those rare "potato chip experiences" - you can't stop after just one. I stayed up WAY too late, but I couldn't wait to see what the next episode had to offer. And I'm actually going to leave it at that, because the less you know about what happens the better. Let me just say that I will truly never forget the city of Skidmore MO and its array of colorful and unconventional inhabitants. I was shocked, I was heartbroken and I was bemused - often simultaneously. I was so close to giving this a perfect rating, but I felt it could have been edited just a bit tighter, especially the final segment. But this is one of the best programs I've seen in a while, and I'm quite tempted to start it over again right away. - Jeff Marshall, Movie Blogger (Facebook) See more J T 08/08/2023 I'm sure there is an amazing story to tell about what happened in Skidmore before and after Ken Rex Macelroy was killed, but this documentary fails miserably. By the second episode it was already getting repetitive - showing the same clips and the same sound bites. The central premise of the series is that the violence that day somehow caused waves of karma that ripples across several decades and played a role in other murders and disappearances. But that's a pretty shaky theory and the stories told don't support it. Also, the documentary does a poor job of explaining just what a terrible person Ken Rex was, and why a whole community would want him gone. This may have been an effect of all the interviews they did with his surviving family members, who try to portray him in a positive light. Anyway, this is not worth your time. See more 01/17/2022 The story was great, especially what happened years down the line in the city - which comes up in episode 4 and beyond in the show. However, this is such a slow-moving, slow-paced, repetitive show that it gets so incredibly boring, quick. It is only good as background noise ultimately, after you hear the story of the first murder. This should've been a 1.5 hour documentary, not a 6 episode run. See more 06/15/2020 Six long episodes of Skidmore, Missouri and they didn't bother to ask why a judge allowed Ken McElroy out on bail after he was convicted of shooting someone in the stomach. They had the time but left open questions as to why the legal system failed to protect the town from the alleged bully. They did take time to make woo-woo insinuations about "karma", when talking about every other bad thing that happened in the town afterwards. And then a local blowhard or two had a lot of time to blow hard. I got tired of hearing the Southern drawl, by the end of the series. It wasn't too bad - it was watchable - but I wouldn't recommend it to a friend. See more Bob S 10/08/2019 Nice to see the old footage over three timelines. Nice to see good old Morley Safer. And that's about it for the good parts. The bad? Highly repetitive. Let me repeat that: it's a re-iteration of the repetition of a thesis that is, in the old-timey phrase, horse puckey. We get a picture of 5 murders over a 30 year period. Were there more? What's the rate per year over the decades? The documentary insinuates there's an extraordinary murder rate in this mysterious town but provides no statistics. Someone please inform the film maker about the old saying "the plural of anecdote is not data." Again, we wonder: Is the murder rate similar, less or more than similarly sized towns? The documentary takes a detour for one episode to discuss the problem with opiates which all by now know have ravaged towns like this. To my taste, this seems to be the straw stirring the drink. But they drop that more plausible thread to go back to old refrain of "must be that crazy vigilante killing from years ago." This brings up a supreme problem of all documentaries: no peer review but the illusion of experience. Your brain is tricked into thinking a cobbled together story is a direct audio visual experience of moments in time. And this series illustrates that problem perfectly. The fact that nothing about the death rates is present for comparison ought to tell you that you're being sold gibberish. If there was something different I think we would have been told. So it's elementary: the dog that doesn't bark is the biggest clue. But if you like looking at old cars and store fronts reminiscent of your youth, you may enjoy a bit. But therein lies the final problem: they stretched out a maximum two hours of story telling into six hours. Lordy! Avi Belkin is an Israeli film director, and might I as someone from a small American town who also happens to have studied and lived off and on in his neck of the woods for decades, respectfully suggest he look into his own backyard for such tales. They are legion! Murders of Arab Israelis and Palestinians, in particular, for which "no one saw a thing" happen not infrequently. (That's a kind way of saying it.) I was a journalist in that region a few decades ago and such stories were well reported in the Israeli press but not so much in the US so this could be informative. We've heard about the horrendous Palestinian violence against Israeli civilians but the conscript soldiers and their well-known (outside the US, that is) lack of discipline in manhandling Palestinian civilians in prison as well as in the streets, was less reported outside Israel itself. You don't forget when you see two 19 year old Israeli soldiers push a 60 year old man to the ground for trying to stop them from teasing a Palestinian kid. This was a daily experience and there was a wall of silence around it. But more specifically, maybe Mr. Avi might direct his attention to the early 1990s case of two Israeli sharpshooters who thought it clever to have a game of who could shoot more Palestinian kids in the head. They were keeping score and the rumors spread but a culture among IDF soldiers of not ratting each other out allowed this sick game to go on for a couple of years. Scores of children were blinded and a couple died (these were rubber bullets but they can be deadly on occasion). What was the culture of the Israeli military that permitted this "not seeing a thing", or that permitted the paltry sentence given to these soldiers when they were finally caught (I think in 1993)? Tackle that instead of nonsense, statistically insignificant death rates in one small town. As an experienced Israeli film-maker he'd have plenty of access, and we're all ready to learn. Tafadal ya Avi. Shalom bro. See more Read all reviews

No One Saw a Thing — Season 1

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